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CAW Population: Balancing Your Population
__TOC__ Introduction ' ' Learning how to populate a world is really only one part of the equation. Creators should also consider how many Sims a world requires to function well. This number will vary according to how big your world is and how many expansion packs you have. Remember the three different kinds of Sims you've learned how to add? Residents, Townies, and Service NPCs? You need to consider carefully how many of each you will need. Also think about the design for these Sims. This part of the tutorial should give you some baseline numbers for your population. Resident Numbers The ideal number of residents depends on how many lots are in your world and how many EA townies you can stand living in your hood. You have a lot of control over this option, but you will need a lot of Sims if you want jobs to function smoothly alongside your characters. Each career has a minimum and maximum number of co-workers depending on the career level. These are listed below. If you don't have enough Sims in your world you can end up with Story Progression drafting Sims built around being doctors into low level journalism careers. It is also important to remember that only resident Sims will be drafted into the following roles: Service Numbers Service Sims all belong to a single invisible household named Service NPC. If you do not add service Sims using the methods described in part one of this series then this household is randomly generated at the start of a save game. In Edit in Game the only service NPC that exists initially is the Grim Reaper. Preliminary testing suggests that the game won't recognise Simbots as service NPCs, although this requires further investigation. :Note - The Mixologists here are different to the Mixologists listed in the townie section below. Service Mixologists can be hired by the phone and live in the Service NPC household. Mixologists that appear in venues are randomly selected/generated homeless Sims. Townie Numbers Townies, or homeless Sims, are often drafted randomly for less formal or more dynamic roles than those occupied by service NPCs. Players can have as many or as few townies as you like. Creators currently cannot choose which role a townie will occupy, so they should account for that in their Sim design. The best way to work out how many of these Sims you might need is to count how many mixology bars, barrier ropes, tattoo chairs, etc you have placed in it, then add +5 to that number to account for paparazzi. Townies will be drafted into the following roles: Narrative tricks But what is this all in aid of? If a player is adding Sims to their world it is because they want the place to have a sense of history, and greater sense of lived-in-ness. So it is worth taking time to discuss different narrative tricks that are available. But first, let's look at the constraints with this method. ;Constraints - No deceased Sims, so all relatives must my living. - No Mummies or Ghosts. - No sims sitting or lying on objects when the world first loads - No skilling history that isn't added in Edit-In-Game. ;Pregnancies - Adding pregnancies is a great way to ensure a few more non-pudding faced Sims will start out in the world, adds a bit of randomness to families (pregancies are always concealed at the world's launch, except for morning sickness). It adds to the ever important sense of history, and can leave players speculating about paternity as in Claire Ursine's case. ;Adding Moodlets - This is a fantastic, if fiddly, feature of EA's debug commands and twallan's MasterController mod. Once you have this unlocked, simply select a Sim you've added to the world, and use the Add Buff command. This will give you a list of all the possible moodlets. You can have a grieving Sims (but because no Sim has actually died the moodlet will be neutral, although the Sims will still cry), Sims that have just eaten Ambrosia (back from the dead?), Sims that have just time-travelled! In my version of Riverblossom Hills I placed a broken, rusty TV beside my mad professor, and have her starting the game Singed. Remember that moodlets like Singed actually cause the Singed state! The possibilities for how your Sims begin their lives with players is very broad here. - It's possible to make Sims that are about to die. Give a Sim the 'On Fire' or 'Mummy's Curse' moodlet, and the player will have to choose whether they save them or not. Time can pass in Edit-In-Game, so you can even run the moodlet down if you're patient. Just don't ever let the Sim die in Edit-In-Game this will either crash the whole programme, or it will result in a corrupted Sim that will NEVER die (this isn't a good thing, the Sim is corrupted, not enhanced, and will mess up player's games. Don't make the mistake of using glitches as part of your narrative!) You can also set Elder's ages very high using SuperComputer, guaranteeing they will die soon after the world first launches. This can help if you want families to have dead Sims in their family trees relatively swiftly - a sense of generations passed. ;Positioning - CAW packages Sims into their lots, apparently, meaning that although they can walk to other lots in EIG, they will always reload ON their own home lots. However, sims can be placed on their own lots, so that two teenagers could be meeting behind a shed for some reason, while the rest of the family is out front. Appropriate moodlets on the two teen sims helps deepen and clarify the player's experience. Thanks to Robodl95 of ModtheSims.info for provided the initial career co-workers list, which has been extended. Category:Tutorials